are you seriously suggesting that there is no basic difference between 'Great Expectations' or Les Miserables, and 'Prince John and The Grey Man of Wisdom' or 'The Gillie Dacker and His Horse' or ' The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne' or any other epic length oral tale we have recorded and believe to have been made and formed by the oral tradition?

The Oral Tradition is the consequence of very wishful folkloric thinking that has so effectively removed individual creativity from the equation and views working-class humanity as a collective mass of instinctive, unthinking, ill-educated primitives. All of this stuff is generated by the same basic means & impulses given that the individual human need for narrative structure operates at a very primal level and that, consequently, narrative will out. Taken to a particular extreme everything becomes folklore - even the writings of a Dickens or a Hugo, once we remove their names that is. After all, there is a just as much of a literary tradition behind The Tain or the stories collected by John Sampson, Asbjorsen & Moe, Thomas Crofton Croker et al (who didn't bother too much with names) as there is behind Dickens and Hugo.

The illusion of an Oral Tradition comes about when there is no paper, nor printing press, only the creative fluidity of the human tongue by which such stories are told & retold, recreated afresh by way of an idiomatic mastery. But the stories of Dickens & Hugo have been re-made too; retold & recreated and will no doubt continue to be as cultural process takes its course. In the end it all comes down to the mastery of individual storytellers; take away their names and what you have is an Oral Tradition - give them back their names and you have an idiom of creative narrative driven by the inner necessities which are common to us all. What shadowy & nameless impulse lurks out there in the Celtic Twilight? What instinctive terror is there that not only generates such tellings, but makes them so immediate to us today?

Once more, I fear, were back to the gulf of class-condescension which has so effectively denied the individual mastery of the working classes, seeing them as passive carriers and random generators of material rather than the specific creators of it. It's an idyllic bourgeois dreaming that has the Folklore, Folk Song, Folk Music as the collective consequence of a people who are incapable of appreciating or understanding its true value, hence the highly academicised nature of such cultural studies today - all a million miles removed from the raw essence that was, and continues to be, its very well-spring.